A brain powered addiction intervention
Details
My role
I acted as both designer and developer on this project.
Tools
Adobe Premier, XD and Illustrator as well as a GoPro for POV filming
Competition
Cheng Wu Innovation Challenge (Finalist)
Methods
Literature review, expert exploration, unstructured interviews
Timeline
February ‘20 - April ‘20
Design Challenge
We were told to design something that would help people, but were also told we did not need to take into account profitability. However, it still needed to be something that could be implemented with the technology that we have today.
Road Map
Proposal
Story Time
Logan has been struggling with opioid addiction for the past few years. He has quit and relapsed a few times, but now he is determined to quit for good. He heard about pre-emt from a friend who used pre-emt to satisfy a court ordered drug treatment.
Once pre-emt arrives he is prompted to set up the system so that it can get a baseline reading. It goes on to tell him about how it uses the smart cap along with the smart watch to determine when he is experiencing an addiction.
Later that week Logan has a rough day at work and after ignoring pre-emts prompts to think long term and step away from the situation, he relapses. What he doesn’t know is that this batch was cut with fentanyl and he overdoses. Luckily pre-emt’s built in emergency alert mechanism kicks in and his emergency contacts as well as an ambulance is contacted.
A few weeks of pre-emt preventing a few lower level urges Logan passes and gets rid of his pipe. Then over a month later Logan passes a big milestone and earns a badge and an amazon gift card for staying clean.
Problem
Brenda’s story
“Part of me wanted to keep using, but more of me wanted to stop.”
Research and reasoning
Leveraging existing government programs and plans
In 2018 the department of health and human services put out a 5 point strategy to combat the opioid crisis with the goal of reducing opioid related morbidity and mortality. Their number one strategy was to improve access to prevention.
The third aspect of report called for improving public health data collection, specifically real time actionable data, which is exactly what I had in mind when I created the overdose response feature in PreEmt. Overall PreEmt fits perfectly into the larger government strategy and thus will hopefully be a great candidate for grant funding.
Expert and user interviews
During the design process I also took the time to ask community stakeholders what they thought about the idea. One counselor at Limestone health here in Bloomington stated that a tool like Preemt would be invaluable for their practice. While one of her patients stated that she trys to use the behavioral strategies her counselor has taught her, but sometimes they just aren’t not enough.
Explanation of technologies
The two most effective psychological treatments for opioid addiction are Cognitive Behavioral therapy and Contingency management. CBT urges patients to evaluate their thoughts to encourage behavior change. While CM reinforces positive behaviors with tangible rewards.
Functional near infrared spectroscopy which will be what is in the pre-emt cap, works by shining a near infrared beam of light into the brain and measuring the amount of oxygenated blood that it comes in contact with. This is useful because the amount of blood in a given brain region is directly correlated to the amount of neuronal activation. Thus, we can measure which parts of the brain are active at any given time. Furthermore, it allows us if we have sufficient baseline testing to detect an addiction related craving or an overdose.
Ambulatory heart rate variability is just a fancy way of saying average pulse over time. The pre-emt watch will be measuring this at all times and will alert the cap any time an irregularity is detected. As shown by Dr. Kennedy and associates average heart rate can be a very good predictor of opioid related cravings.
If you have ever been to a hospital and had the little thumb clamp that makes your finger turn red that is PPG. This is a great option for measuring heart rate, but also comes with the exciting possibility of measuring respiratory function, which is the best predictor of an opiate overdose. The pre-emt watch will incorporate this technology to help with the overdose detection.
Implementation
This allocation was created with the $10,000 prize money in mind, but the ratios would remain similar regardless of the capital invested.
I removed the exact dates because they are no longer relevant, but the timeline could be implemented at any time.